The amazing character roster will bring a huge amount of fun, value, and replayability
User Rating: 9.5 | Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 X360
Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 is a re-release of Marvel vs Capcom 3 which keeps up the recent Capcom trend of annoying fans and adding extra content for newcomers like me. What you get with this game is a total of 48 Marvel and Capcom characters battling it out in teams of 3 at rapid speeds. You can choose any team of 3 characters you desire, and switch between them on the fly during the match. As you fight, you build up your Hyper Combo gauge which can be filled up to 5 levels. Tapping the assist button calls them in for a single attack. You can trigger a Crossover Combination which calls in your allies to team together for a powerful, combined attack which costs a full meter. A successful 'Snap Back' move forces your opponent to switch out to an opponent of your choice at the cost of a full meter. A Crossover Counter costs a full meter and is used after blocking and can turn defence into offence as your character switches. The 4 basic attacks you have are on the face buttons of the controller and are light, medium, heavy attacks and Special; which basically launches your opponent into the air. As a general guide, a decent combo would be to hit the light, medium, heavy then special attacks. This then can be chained into an air combo. After the special button launches the opponent into the air, you then press up to jump up with them, then continue to deal the damage. After getting a few extra hits, you can then press the special button to call your opponent in mid air which is known as the Team Air Combo, and this can be repeated to call in your final team member. If you have played previous Capcom games, you will know a couple of moves for each character since the usual Ryu Hadouken move (down, right-down, right, attack) is used for all characters as is the Shoryuken (right, down, down-right, attack). I found the game fairly confusing at first, but once you read into the mechanics and can air combo properly and use Hyper Combos to deal the damage, then normal difficulty will be straight forward. Arcade mode has 6 fights, then ends in a battle with Galactus from Fantastic 4. Galactus is huge and can dish out some insane damage, but most moves can be blocked by holding 'back' and other moves can be prevented by dishing out enough damage. Heroes and Heralds mode has a series of battles to win territory and cards. The cards have a certain effect on the battles and you choose 3 in your deck. The amount of characters help provide a great amount of fun, value, and replayability. Hardcore fighters will no doubt spend lots of time experimenting with the possible permutations to see which characters work the best in their combos. Mission mode gives you the challenge of performing 10 set combos with each character. The bad thing about this mode is only the name of the move appears on screen, and you have to go into the pause menu to see the actual button presses that are required. The main criticism I have with the game is that it seems a bit too fast paced which seems to encourage button mashing. Sometimes to get the combo correct, you have an insanely small time window (we are talking tenths of a second) to input the next command. The great thing is that it is a fun game with an amazing character roster and wonderful graphics which will provide many hours of entertainment.
